Anthology of the Self - Entry XIII
Seraphim Vampirism - The Ballad of a Fallen Angel
I once was a gorgeous seraphim. I brushed my feathers before bed every night, lathered my skin, excised every pore of sinful presences. I sipped juice boxes of ambrosia and ate the Gaian corpses of heaven’s fresh denizens. I’d spit-roast them over a fire, pierced by the spear of longinus, warmed over divine effervescent blooms of god-pockets. I’d hang out a lot by god-pockets, warming my wings, my eye, my rheum prismatically glistening in hues of aesthetic sublimity. I tried to take a god-pocket with me once but my feathers got seared into transparency and spread across space-time. I guess it’s cool to know my palm skin and feathers are infinite now, but it’s kinda freaking me out they might currently be in my lungs.
I was kind of a bad seraphim. I’d bum cigarettes from the lower-order angels, tended to fuck off a lot of the times and hang out in the Edenic flora-bouquets. They don’t have real water in heaven, just vague pools, and they only get, like, the prettiest plants. No fungi, molds or cacti made it feel lame as fuck after a while. Sometimes a moldy snack or two keeps it all thrilling. I also got a bit of a drinking problem at some point. Lots of bread and wine hanging around in heaven, little cellars under the clouds of stuff they call Jesus to be all funny. At least I think it’s a joke. I’ve never met a person big enough to eat that much of him. I gained a lot of weight, slept in flower beds, got a ton of migraines, didn’t really have the will to do anything. Heaven is an art, this divine construction intangible to the senses beyond memories of beauty. If you focus enough, it’s just chaotic geometry sprayed with an old woman’s perfume, but it’s fun to make my own little stories out of my sensory delusions.
I don’t even know why I bothered being nice in life, God is such a narcissist. Sing a fucking song, do all these fucking rituals. Just let me take a breather, play some video games, submit myself to translucence, get fucked by someone. The bastard struck me with lightning when I tried to beat the shit out of him after he explained what determinism is. Yeah fucking right you know what tomorrow brings. Even if you did, I literally don’t give a shit, I’m just trying to find something new and rad and different that I wasn’t meant for. He struck me so fucking hard with lightning. My entire nervous system was shot, every feather charred, my flesh cooked from the inside out and my muscles disintegrated.
I don’t think I’m a Seraphim anymore. I don’t think heaven is mine anymore. I think I’m just fat and stupid and bound by circadian rhythms and finite consciousness, infinite volition and fuck-all I actually want to do. I think I’m just meat cubes reconstructed from the corpses I ate. The adipocere dressing and effluvium glaze they were lathered with is now the rot of my entrails. I think there’s just a crucible of mud in my stomach that gurgles for more every once in a while before ingraciously squeezing it out my anus. I wish a handful of peanuts could just sit inside of me, make a little peanut archipelago, and the voracious mud could just smile and be satiated by the pleasure of the construct. Instead it demands its daily fats, salts and sugar. My mud swells and wrenches. I’m bloated with dead things.
I think the electricity drank my art. My head was gutted open by a can opener. My angelic curls were buzzcut off and I was forced to devour them strand by strand. I cried and choked them down for hours. I don’t want to eat anymore, please. It’s killing me. I can’t breathe. I felt them itch and gag me all the way down, tempt themselves around my vocal cords and into my lungs. I’m still angel enough that it didn’t kill me, but it sure was a divine punishment. I’m currently staring at my scalp and skull-cap on the floor beside me. A cloud of carnal body odour paralyzed me with non-descript fear. Every dizzying sway created squelches of blood and screaming neural creases. Every inch of matter seared by the cold sting of oxygen.
I stood in the open fields of the bad parts of purgatory until a swarm of bloated mosquitos flocked in, dazed by the reek of exposed encephalic matter. I felt each leg take refuge and nestle between my neurons. I heard the buzzes from the inside of my skull. A sickening tinnitus. My eyes glazed over. Repeat stabs by the divine entomic feminine, by hairy viral strings. Drink my art with thine unfurled liquorice-wheel proboscis. My blood is nectar, and my art is it’s sugar. Swell, swell your stomachs with my art. Every sip is creative violence. Every dot of ink spilled is ink spoken of. I am a finite reservoir. I bear only so much art. Please don’t take it all! But to make art is to have less art to give. One can only draw the same subject so many times before people catch on. My art is drinking my other art through motifs! Stop drinking or I won’t be creative enough to go any further!
The bugs are ceaseless for as long as the canteen keeps its doors unlocked. I can’t close the doors. If I close them, it all falls apart! More spilled, more spilled, my brain matter paints the fucking walls in gory brushstrokes. Still there is a want to keep saying, to paint broader; a want to keep screaming. Paint-fraught fucking screams. I retch up paint, violently vomiting puddles of set hues, creamy turpentine stinging my nose and freckling my bare legs, tinting my surroundings with rainbow-blood until all is prettified by my emulsified mud. My feathers are slick with blood and oil, too heavy to flap.
Art is the coolest form of ultraviolence. I reach into my exposed cranium and pluck all the fattened mosquitos out like berries. I pop one in my mouth and bite down and a squelch of paint and hairy limbs crinkles and snaps and gushes out over my palate. I am gagging, my reflexes retching with the indigestibility of a mouth full of plastic, yet I smile and gurge it down. Once all plucked off and on their way to disseminate the little pouches of prions they snatched from me, I reach in myself and start worming my fingers around the rim of my skull. I’m a champagne glass of art. Poking my fingers into all the little slimy slits, wiggling my finger around the tepid gray matter trying to jolt it out of an episode of cold numbness. This is how I make more art after my head’s been quartered and bled dry by my pest friends. It’s not always mosquitos. Sometimes I welcome leeches and ticks into my ballroom of hormonal art. It takes a few slaps, some fisting, occasionally sticking on the adhesive pads of a defibrillator (which always harvest a couple ripe layers of neurons from the surface. It’s okay, the surface is always the soft gelatinous part. The weakest links.
It starts beating again and in floods the despondence and sadness and complaints. Oh boohoo, you have to think and feel things! I’m starting to get sick and tired of this whole brain thing. I cup both my hands and scoop my brain out of my still-open head. I hold it in front of my eyes, let it writhe between my fingers, inspect it a little by rotating it around. Some sniffing, some licks. I shake it and puddles of pink mucus slobber onto the pavement. Little buddy is either drooling or cumming. I get curious and sink my teeth in. Its flesh is soft, like the yolk of a hard-boiled egg. My incisors glide through, and I can hear the snapping and popping of neurons with my slicing chomp. Guilty nerves blaze through my teeth, yet my tongue jigs around in the excised polyps. The last little bit is sinewy, but it falls into my mouth with a snapping shut of my jaw. I chew and chew, passing it between the molars of each side, ferrying it across my mouth by the tip of my tongue. I feel the ideas melt into each other on my palate, get bubbled in little pockets of saliva, before eventually sliding down my throat. I bite more and more little slices out of my brain. It tastes a bit amniotic, very rich, hard to describe beyond pungent, iron-soaked egg yolk. My stomach is pretty full of brain matter, but there’s only a little bit left, so I end up forcing it down until I feel nauseously full. The gagging and acid reflux kicks up again. My body knows I’ve done wrong, but now I can start fresh again. All the ideas and images, all the judgements and perceptions, are separate again. Rediscoverable. My head is empty, and perhaps now I can keep making art without worry of spilling too much of the great ink carton.
I think the electricity drank my beauty. I got viciously bruised and lacerated by cliff-faces and tree-branches on my descent from heaven. My feathers were aflame. They’re thick with fat and grease. I rub my fingers along one, scooping off half the swill. It adhesively coats my fingers. I’ve nowhere to rub it off but my own exposed skin, shredded in the descent into flaky bubbles. I rub it off somewhere in-tact, by my hip, but still there is a stickiness on my fingers, a fair coat on the source feather, and now a clot on my hip-skin. The disgusting infectiousness, uncleanable, still consumes my sense of self-preservation. Yet every want to feel clean further sullies my skin, risks infecting my cuts. I’m lathered in disgusting waxes, painted by their lipic viscosity. Dunes of yellow gelatin bask my every appendage, dribble down my surfaces.
I just want to be pretty again, to sit in the cleansing God-pocket, not caked in my own melted fat. I can’t be pretty and of flesh. I want to become light and assorted plastics. How much must burn? I’ll be as a lamp, I’ll self-immolate, the oils will rid of themselves under blaze, turn to fragrant carnal smoke. I strike a match and burn my naked body. Again to be warm from my deepest recesses, again to glow. All cold beckons us to love, for it is love which makes us warm. The hugging of a great flame is how Gaia shows her love. Flames siphon oxygen out of the air. I begin to choke, asphyxiated by both the smoke and the thirsting flames. I feel the grease char, caking me in blackstone. I move with crackles, with popping skin and crispened feathers.
After fifteen minutes of screams stretched across hours, my body broiled with crunchy scales of charcoal, I found my nerves screaming in ache, still living under the dead waste and cartilage. With all my might, I pry my jaw open from my hardened cheekmeat, my lips a coral reef of dead and blackened skin. I gasp a pained breath, my throat (the only still living flesh) repulsively flooded with ash. I cannot die or age, so thus I must live in beauty. To live as an ugly thing is to live incomplete, undesired by any but your own entitled ego. I burned my fat yet I’m far from pretty. My feathers crumble to dust with every gust of breeze, my skin further cracks and splits. I begin to walk, my skin tiled, droughted as scorched earth. I scream with the snapping of my hardened skin, the disintegration of what once I sacredly kindled. I walk, seeking a pool of water, hoping it will all wash away and I can be reborn again under the carbon egg-shell.
I stumble through the colourless landscape endlessly until blessed with rainfall. It rinses me, each drop activating my singed nerve-ends. Yet cleaner I grow. The charred skin and fat wash away. What remains is pink, searingly raw, nubile as fetal gelatin. I slop around, my skinlessness sticky-to-the-touch. Pure pink muscles. I stare intently into the tarred puddles at my feet and I’m made oddly giddy by the strange, vague reflection. Still I am lumpy and wrong. It’s my bones. It must be some weird bones. I insert my fingers between my anemonous muscle fibers, unweaving them to clear an opening to their contained twigs of ivory. I wrap my fingers around my tibia and clunk, crack, snap it out with extensive force. My muscles collapse into a puddle of noodles, my gelatinous underdeveloped skin splatters the earth. I pop the wide end of the bone in my mouth and begin to whittle it down with my teeth. Scrape, scrape, scrape. Sand out the lumps. Thinner. Thinner. Just barely thick enough to stand on. Joints are for those with bad balance, sand down your lumps. My mouth fills with bone meal and a plaque patina of calcium. My lips are the colour of chalk, the only thing besides my eyes and sparse feathers which hasn’t been washed pink. I wriggle the muscles back apart and slot in the sculpted bone. Reclaiming my body utterly from its biology. I’ll be pretty again and decide what that means.
Rinse and repeat for every bone. Wriggle, crack, clunk, splat, scrape, squirm. It takes weeks. My teeth have grown dull and bloody. The bones, utterly broken, heal with the melted skin as I grind away at the next part of myself. My skull and spine are unremovable, so I’ve taken up a box cutter to peel away the now-healing skin to shave down the rest. I cry and scream and agonize, but I think I am prettier now. If I’m not prettier, if I went too far somewhere, I’d be ruined. Going too far scared me more than the exposed nerves and infected, inactive muscle fibers as I whittled away. Irreversible. Utterly so. A thick branch can be whittled, but a twig can't be buffed. I played it very carefully. By the end I was gaunt, waifish, my skin still patched with the gelatinous pinks of a raw chicken breast. I crawled for the next few months, my face peeling off from unstitched incisions, but it’s alright. I’ll be pretty when it heals. I find a horse brush and a tree stump and start brushing my feathers one by one. I’ve learned to love each and every one of them and intimately lick and brush the last bastions of ash off them. I don’t want to fly, I just want to be pretty. I weep to wetten my brush when my mouth gets too dry. It’s a very slow, meditative process, wiping it all clean. At least this time it doesn’t stick, just flicks away like tar-dust glitter. Healing is nice. Drink a warm tin of soup, and let that warmth make your cells cozy enough to rebuild. We’re surprisingly resilient creatures when we’re unable to die. I think even if I was a puddle, I could rebuild. I don’t want to test it. It hurt so much to burn alive and peel off the hardened chunks of skin. It hurt so much to have the mosquitos drink me and to vomit up paint. I don’t want to hurt anymore. I just want to die and sleep. No heaven, just frosting dreams and god-pockets to cuddle with as I descend into oblivion.
I think the electricity coagulated my sublimity. Utterly shot through, the light sucked out of me, smoked away. It drank my transcendence and now I am dead feathers. I keep brushing, brushing, aggressively brushing until the hairs frill and wear. I take pause. A spurt of blood jets out of one of my knuckles as I tighten my hand on the brush. My eyes well up. I’m alone in my burning. There is no sublime without the other. I’m on an island of concrete, static and pyroclastic haze. The great in-between. A colourless waiting room reeking of moth balls and malaise. There are no bridges off, no ropes back up to the clouds. I think of how my palm-skin would melt off my hand and smear on ascending Eden’s hanging vines.
I’m not going anywhere, so why rush things? It’s all just a hazy malaise, there is no such thing as the future. It’s one of God’s grandest lies. I pluck the halo off my head and stick my fingers in my cheek. It's gotten gross, I'll clean it with my spit. They’re clammy and shaking when I pull them out. Just moist enough. Rubbing, rubbing in small little circles. Smaller. Smaller. There is no rush, no need for anything short of spotlessness. I’m cleaning my metaphorical room today, for purgatory has no walls, just agoraphobic episodes and pure grey expanse. I’m cleaning my room today with tremulous rubs. My hands look aged, wrinkled, crusted by a rubescent plaster. I keep rubbing the brass ring. Haloes are brass, by the way. Gold is too expensive these days. I’m healing as I rub, or so it feels. Aging, healing, ameliorating my rot. It’s pleasant to slow down. It’s almost sublime, but I’m still alone. I can’t be sublime like this. Blood jets out again and stains my navel. It’s okay. It has time to heal. I rub and rub and quiver and shiver and sink into the task, but it’s so cold, but I press on and rub and rub and believe if I can just make my halo spotless, it will all be sublime again, so I rub and I bleed and I stain it, and I cry a little, but I keep rubbing, enamoured by the brief brass scintillations that crack through the sanguine patina and splotches of leathered skin. It fills my heart, if just for a moment, that if I can’t be sublime, at least this can. This halo, this task, this moment.
I drop my halo in exhaustion after a while and snuggle with my wings. Latent static shocks bite my cheek, but I know it’s a friend. I know it’s healing. I know it will keep me warm. I lay down and rest for a bit. I’m warm again and sink into reveries. I can’t actually sleep in purgatory, but I can doze off and see pictures, put myself wherever I want. Right now, I’m in a sun-warmed cot in an attic room right by the window. Dancing, cooling shadow slits of tree branches stripe my face and partition my features. It’s November. The last bastion of leaves hold strong in the throes of amber against impending frost-death. I can see the days before, the metamorphosis from emerald to scarlet to blonde. I can smell the mud and upturned turf on the breeze. I watch the passing of ants along the chipped-paint sill, kept warm by a blanket of sun-dust. I can feel the linen sheets, the paint-caked wood sill, the shielded breezes within the twinkling glass, the heat-sucking metal bed-frame; all against the back of my hand. I can hear the floorboards creak as the breeze rummages through the house. I can taste the smells of childhood: the smells of fresh bread from Sunday dinner, the carpet banking years of pheromones and musk, the salad of fragrances dormant in the paint, cushions and technology traceable through intimacy.
Somewhere in all of this, there is home. I’m lucidly reminded of my own self-deception, but I’m in no rush. I dream on. For once I hold the dream and live in it. For once the transitory fog refuses to settle in hypnopompic jolts or the blurting bloodspouts reigning terror on my unhealed flesh. This is sublime. This is premier living. Even in my lonesome, even unmoving in sopor’s cot, I am together with those I once hugged. Heaven was never a place but a blinding delusion to the sublimity of a second. I cried ephemeral tears and wet my ephemeral cot and sang an ephemeral song on the changing of seasons. It is all fleeting, yet still it pulsates. My brain, my pain, my heart and my art are never settled. Ink may sink to paper’s drink, but never think the well do shrink.
I wake and I smile and I bleed and shiver, but I rub and rub on. My greatest art in the palm of my hands. It’s spilling out of me as my fingers caress the metal, massage off the crumbs of detritus and mounting fog. They rub not for cleanliness, nay for sublimity, no longer they do! They rub to show they’re still pulsing. With intimate tactility, they scrape and buffer, they huff and squeak for days on end. Art is not a pool, a competition of spitfire profundities, it is the quiet transcendence of passionate dedication towards writhing a submerged sponge dry. I polish and wipe and spruce up the halo until it glows with blooming warmth. Beauty is not in the idyllic or sculpted, but lying in frozen anticipation for the warmth of kindness in the eyes of the beholder. I squint at the halo and twirl it around. Not a crumb in sight. My very own god-pocket in the palm of my hands. I sat by it for a few hours in disbelief, watching it emit light all on it's lonesome, letting it beguile me through the coruscated brilliance it brought to my swamp of congealed blood and tearsalt. I’m still here, I tell myself, but I think I’ve won. It glows brighter with those words, expanding outward. The bloom drinks me up, turns the greys of purgatory into a kaleidoscopic phosphene. I try to pick it up, to put it back on my head, but my hands are sucked in, vanish into its divine iridescence. I fall into it, embrace it, vanish into the ether and melt into space-time, a new hugging infinite.